Precast Inc. - September/October 2008 - (Page 60) PROJECT PROFILE Ingenuity Pays Off With Use of Precast Builder achieves 9-foot ceiling heights and a cantilevered pool. Photos courtesy Nitterhouse Concrete Products Inc. L ewie Bloom completed one of his magnificent new dream homes several months ago in a refurbished area about 15 minutes from downtown Bethesda, Md., home to many multimillion-dollar lakeside homes. Other developers have also started converting old, smaller homes in this suburban area into new, larger homes in the same space. Local officials, however, have put the brakes on oversized homes, lowering the maximum height from 35 feet to 30 feet. They have also imposed new restrictions that will make it nearly impossible for builders to achieve ceiling heights in new construction higher than 8 feet when using the typical 16-inchdeep wood beams for the flooring. In considering the building restrictions, Bloom started thinking about how he could still achieve his desire to have the 9-foot-high ceilings he wanted in his prestigious new home overlooking the Potomac River. His search for a solution led SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 | PRECAST INC. him to Nitterhouse Concrete Products Inc., located in Chambersburg, Pa. While researching Nitterhouse’s Web site (www.nitterhouse.com), he read about the benefits, spans and loading capacities of the precaster’s new ConCoreFloor structural flooring system and gave Nitterhouse a call. That phone call resulted in a meeting with Nitterhouse Concrete’s vice president of Engineering, John M. Jones, who was able to engineer the entire precast concrete sub-flooring system, including an area with solid plank designed to support a 500,000-pound cantilevered swimming pool in midair overlooking the Potomac River. Bloom compared the total costs of other flooring systems (including the labor, carpenters, material and equipment) to the ConCoreFloor System for his $3-to-$5 million residential project and found that, overall, the concrete floor system 60 http://www.nitterhouse.com
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